LogFAQs > #951621923

1.) Vectorman (Genesis, 1995)


Nick nailed it...in this essay I will tell you about why Vectorman is the greatest game ever

Just kidding.

1.) Chrono Trigger (SNES, 1995)


Of course its Chrono Trigger - and very happy birthday to the greatest game of all time and the greatest story about time travel of all time. I own this game on damn near every platform that I've ever owned, including the mobile platforms which are not a normal platform for me to game on.

What makes Chrono Trigger stand up above and beyond the rest? For one thing the pace with which it unveils itself is pretty special. Despite being a story about time travel, it unveils just enough about itself at the beginning to catch your interest and litters all sorts of hints about the world around you. A dinosaur racer? A robot? Medieval style clothing and knights mixed in. A little twinkle of magic in Guardia but its obviously not the thing that makes the world go round.

And...your inventor friend who has apparently invented a teleporter machine. Pretty fancy.


Then you get swept into the medieval past and the distant dystopian future. Despite the mechanism for the storytelling here being time travel and thus sending you all through the timeline out of order, the story is being told in a logical and straightforward way where youre getting every piece of information exactly when you need it to make sense of the story. Everything about this is masterfully crafted. The trial completely BLEW MY MIND the first time I played through the game



Perhaps the biggest plot twist is that the first major character you meet - Frog - isn't actually that important. And his archetypal evil foe - actually has completely justified and understandable goals that are completely misrepresented by the way we remember history. And ACTUALLY they hook into the settings true deepest darkest secrets. You witness the consequences of Lavos going unchecked. You see what happens on the day that Lavos wakes up. You even see the ill-fated gambit that brings lavos to the planet and worse, see the acts people took that end up making the lavos situation so goddamn dire in the first place.



The music is perfect, the characters are great. Even the smallest details early on in the game end up paying off. Dozens of tiny little mysteries and subplots are littered around the map and then executed. The fact that you can get lifelike dolls from the fair in the very beginning pays off during the game's climax. The subplot where Robo is used to save a forest and prevents the creation of a desert later in the game is touching in ways I didn't initially expect.

Everything is carefully placed into an elaborate and intricate arrangement. Like a clock. It all fits together to form a perfect whole that shines through as an unexpectedly wholesome and amazing story. And in the end, I think Lavos is one of the better villains you could ask for. He's a force of nature. A problem that needs solved. He's not some mustache twirling mega-villain. In fact the game gives us four of those and three of them are comedy goofs and the third 4th is Magus who isn't actually that at all! It's just there. It's always there. Mankinds doom engineered by mankind. In some ways an allegory for the climate issues we face.

And then because everything is so carefully laid out and put together, the New Game + mode makes it so you can challenge Lavos at every different point in the game - all of which have cute little names which is an underrated thing games should do - and each provides a different ending. A different what if, based on where things were left in the various timelines. I love it. The game is magic and life.

And that's why it's my favorite game of all time.

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Board 8's Voice of Reason
https://imgur.com/AWY4xHy